I was worried before I saw the play 'The Seven Storey Mountain', thinking I don't really want to see a play about Thomas Merton. He probably wouldn't have either, ideally. Then it isn't. It's more about us and it's about our relationship to what he may or may not have thought about. It's its own thing completely.

I need to go someplace faraway that doesn't have telephones and doesn't have a record player and doesn't have movie theaters and people walking down the street in order to not do anything.

There's very little admirable about being a pirate. There's very little functional about a pirate. There's very little real about a pirate.

I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.

When you're listening to a recording, you're supposedly listening to some aspect of the past in the present as you travel slowly into the future, but you also know there's a very strong likelihood that the future of that recording, whether you made it or whether you're listening to a Led Zeppelin record, is going to continue probably far beyond where you are.

I think that what trips up a lot of great musicians is that they become involved with too many things that aren't where their strengths lie.

I don't like going to cities. I don't mind maybe being in a city sometimes for a few hours, but I pretty much don't like cities. I don't even like passing through them.